Exposing your identity is the single biggest deterrent to doing anything malicious.

2) What is their history/reputation in the community and forums?

Important, ideally in conjunction with #1.

3) Are they technically competent?

The client is not yet resilient enough to be managed by non-technical delegates. Delegates should be scripting their price feed updates and missed block notification, and should be able to react swiftly to attacks on the network.

4) Are they running more than 1 delegate?

I refuse to vote more than 1 delegate per person. Furthermore, if a person has more than a couple of delegates in the top 101 I will do my best to vote them ALL out. It is harmful and should be discouraged.

5) What is their payrate and usage of funds?

Obvious, but not terribly important.

Based on these criteria I think the quality of delegates needs to improve.

The candidate could post a YouTube video where they say their full name, country of residence, and delegate account name in clear view of the camera. But how would we know that is the real delegate and not some actor an attacker hired to act as the person behind one of the attacker's many sockpuppet delegates?

It seems to me that pseudonyms with community trust built over time is good enough.

Great, such a discussion enhances the quality and security of DPOS considerably.

Whether identity has been verified sufficiently is up to the voters. Public identity makes sense long term imo since a delegate would risk his overal reputation if the scam is revealed (if someone points out that the picture belongs to someone else).

I refuse to vote more than 1 delegate per person. Furthermore, if a person has more than a couple of delegates in the top 101 I will do my best to vote them ALL out. It is harmful and should be discouraged.

I agree with your focus on reputation.

I disagree about refusing to vote for anyone running multiple delegates.

I think it is helpful if very trusted members of the community run more than one delegate as a candidate (at least until we have more than 101 great delegate candidates). They should be named in a clear way to make it obvious they are all related (use sub accounts). They should also be clearly ordered by priority so if you are only going to vote for one of their delegates you vote for delegate "1".

for example:1.alphaBar -> this is your primary delegate, encourage people to vote for this one if they only want you to have one delegate.2.alphaBar -> this is your secondary, if someone really trusts and likes you a lot they may vote for both your primary and secondary delegate.3.alphaBar -> this is your tertiary

If it gets very competitive and we have lots of great candidates and we don't allow more than 101 delegates (I prefer a dynamic number) than it could get to the point where few if any would be able to get more than their primary delegate elected. But, I don't think we should judge people negatively for running multiple delegate candidates in a transparent way. If someone was caught trying to run sockpuppets without being upfront then that is a problem and a trust issue.

If it gets very competitive and we have lots of great candidates and we don't allow more than 101 delegates (I prefer a dynamic number) than it could get to the point where few if any would be able to get more than their primary delegate elected. But, I don't think we should judge people negatively for running multiple delegate candidates in a transparent way. If someone was caught trying to run sockpuppets without being upfront then that is a problem and a trust issue.

1.I prefer a dynamic number of delegates also.2.I thing we have allready enough great candidates but the most are in standby mode because candidates with much vote power have multiple delegates voted in...3.We must consider that the competition will use the multiple delegate phenomena in a negative way...It's a shame to give them such an oportunity. So we must in a consensus way self regulate "our delegate election policy" 4.It is better* to have 101 individual delegates active with an average reliability of 90% (for example) then 65 individual delegates that have all 100% reliability... Am I missing something?

I refuse to vote more than 1 delegate per person. Furthermore, if a person has more than a couple of delegates in the top 101 I will do my best to vote them ALL out. It is harmful and should be discouraged.

I agree with your focus on reputation.

I disagree about refusing to vote for anyone running multiple delegates.

I think it is helpful if very trusted members of the community run more than one delegate as a candidate (at least until we have more than 101 great delegate candidates). They should be named in a clear way to make it obvious they are all related (use sub accounts). They should also be clearly ordered by priority so if you are only going to vote for one of their delegates you vote for delegate "1".

for example:1.alphaBar -> this is your primary delegate, encourage people to vote for this one if they only want you to have one delegate.2.alphaBar -> this is your secondary, if someone really trusts and likes you a lot they may vote for both your primary and secondary delegate.3.alphaBar -> this is your tertiary

If it gets very competitive and we have lots of great candidates and we don't allow more than 101 delegates (I prefer a dynamic number) than it could get to the point where few if any would be able to get more than their primary delegate elected. But, I don't think we should judge people negatively for running multiple delegate candidates in a transparent way. If someone was caught trying to run sockpuppets without being upfront then that is a problem and a trust issue.

Your post sums up perfectly how I feel about this, and your example is almost exactly how my delegates are set up.

I don't see how providing multiple highly reliable delegates is harmful, especially when it's obvious that they're from the same person through the use of sub accounts.

In general, I'm for only one delegate per person - but the rules right now almost force you to get more than one:

1) you're not allowed to raise rates and 2) you're not allowed to "turn off" delegates without voting them out.Therefore, if you want a dynamic payrate that follows the market, you have to have more than one delegate set up like liondani did.

I also think that someone with reliable two delegates well below the average delegate payrate is better than have two people with two different delegates with 100% payrates.

It would be best if there is only one, but the rules of the game give you incentives to have more than one.